LTER Site Byte

LTER Site: Florida Coastal Everglades

Contributor: Linda Powell (Aug 03, 2005)

Site Byte:

Over the past year, Linda Powell (information manager) and Mike Rugge (project manager), have concentrated their efforts on several important components of the Florida Coastal Everglades (FCE) LTER program’s information management system: 1) designing and implementing a new tool to capture EML, 2) expanding the Oracle9i Database and 3) upgrading the FCE web page.

One our site’s of the most significant accomplishments has been the creation of a new EML tool called ‘Excel2EML’. Since the inception of the FCE LTER, comprehensive metadata for each dataset has been entered into an Excel metadata template by our individual researchers. The challenge for the FCE was to find a way to capture EML compliant (tier 4 or 5) metadata using the Excel spreadsheet format our researchers were happy using and to convert it to a valid EML XML document. Mike Rugge spent several intensive months developing and tweaking the Excel2EML tool and in November of this past year, the tool was made available to the IM community through a LTER network office (LNO) CVS (http://cvs.lternet.edu/cgi bin/viewcvs.cgi/eml/tools/Excel2EML/). We were able to add a MAC OS X version of the tool to the CVS in February 2005. Links to the Excel2EML CVS can also be found in the Data section of the FCE website at http://fcelter.fiu.edu/data/tools/. Three quarters of the FCE legacy metadata have been re-entered into the new EML metadata templates and converted and will be ready to be harvested by the LNO metacat by the third week of August 2005.

In the upcoming weeks, we will be upgrading our information management system by adding three large servers to replace existing equipment: 1) a web server, 2) an Oracle9i database server and 3) a data server. Our plan is to integrate our project management information, data and corresponding metadata and project GIS coverages into our Oracle9i database. We still have a few web pages driven by our original MS Access database and Mike Rugge is nearly finished migrating this project information into the Oracle9i database. We have been busy collecting and entering LTER and LTER related project information into our Oracle9i database in order to enhance our web-based interactive mapping application called the ‘FCE LTER Interactive Everglades Map’ found on our web site at http://fcelter.fiu.edu/gis/everglades-map/.

As we are beginning to prepare for our 2006 funding renewal, several enhancements have been made to the FCE website. We’ve slowly been adding detailed information into our ‘researcher profile’ pages and have expanded personnel queries to include FCE site roles, research interests, FCE working group membership, affiliated organization, and keywords. Mike Rugge has improved the FCE publications web page, allowing the user to query our archive by author, journal name, publication type, and keyword. In the past year, we worked with Susan Dailey (FCE Education and Outreach Coordinator) to add a FCE Schoolyard program component (http://fcelter.fiu.edu/schoolyard/) to the website. We plan to work with the FCE Graduate Student Organization to update their section of the website.

Web design by Wade Sheldon, Georgia Coastal Ecosystems LTER